


Ever After

by TaraHarkon



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Arguing, Emotional Hurt, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Nightmares, Post-Finale, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-10
Updated: 2018-03-10
Packaged: 2019-03-29 06:47:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13921617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TaraHarkon/pseuds/TaraHarkon
Summary: After the Forgetting, and the Hunger, and the Umbra Staff. After the Relics, and the Bureau, and the Story and the Song, Lup and Barry should have slid right back together. That's what they wanted. But there were jagged little edges there that neither of them could see.





	Ever After

_ Barry couldn’t see the sky. It was blurred, a foggy haze far beyond the times he’d looked up without his glasses on. It was as though a thin film hung between him and the upper atmosphere. And he could hear people talking, but he didn’t understand what they were saying. It was urgent, desperate, important, and meaningless. He looked around, and he didn’t know who they were. He didn’t know who any of them were, or where he was, or why he couldn’t see the sky. Fear gripped him as he turned in place, trying to find anything real he could grab onto. Instead, he just found emptiness and loss. He was alone, his body was gone, and he was staring up at a sky turned black. He watched the colors shift inside it and knew there was nothing he could do. He’d already tried... _

* * *

He woke up in a cold sweat, gasping for breath. He choked out the words for a light cantrip and grabbed his glasses off the nightstand. He was shaking with reaction and with a very visceral fear that still gripped him. He tried to fight that down, turning to see if he’d woken Lup. Her side of the bed was empty, the blankets tossed aside. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. He stumbled out of bed, heading downstairs. His mind spun wildly, conjuring every possible scenario but fixing on only one fact: Lup was gone. He had made it downstairs and already confirmed that her cloak was still hanging by the door when he saw the light in the kitchen. Relief flooded him when he walked in and found her sitting at the table with a mug of hot cocoa between her hands. He dropped into the chair, the anxiety that had been swirling in him releasing in one sentence.

“Gods, this is... this is fucked.”

She looked up at him and for a moment the silence hung between them like a chasm neither was quite ready to cross. Then Lup took a breath and took the first step.

“...I’m sorry, Bear.”

Her voice was quiet and her head down, but her words carried across the divide. Barry gave her a shaky smile.

“Yeah. Yeah, me too, Lup.” He scrubbed at his face for a moment, pushing his glasses up. Then it was like a dam had released and the words poured out of him. “Lup, what... Why... Why did you leave like that? Why didn’t you say something?”

Lup’s head snapped up and she looked at him with a decade’s worth of hurt in her eyes.

“I _tried_ _to_ , Barry. I tried to say something to everyone and... Fuck, Barry, you didn’t even listen to me.”

Her hand came down on the table hard and they both stopped for a moment, listening to the sound echo in the room. 

“I...I didn’t... I thought...”

“You thought wrong, Bluejeans.”

For a long moment, Barry just stared down at the wood grain of the table Magnus had made for them.

“I thought you were gone. I thought the cycles were over and you were just... gone. And you left me and Taako and we didn’t know why or where and we searched but...”

“I thought you were ignoring how I felt because...because... it was fucking inconvenient to the plan. Because everyone else could live with fucking up an entire plane and I couldn’t.”

There were tears on his cheeks, her voice was pitched up just close to shouting. Neither of them could look at the other. Lup stood. She slammed her mug down beside the sink and leaned heavily on the counter for a minute.

“We should... We should talk this out, Bear, and I know that but...”

He turned. She walked. He stood up fast. His chair clattered on the floor.

“Lup, please...” His voice was raw with emotion and she turned to look at him. Barry had one hand outstretched towards her and his chair lay on the floor between them. “Please don’t. It’s... Lup, babe, I... I should’ve listened then. I fucked that up real good. Believe me, I know. We can... we can talk later if that’s what you want, just please, don’t leave.”

The ‘again’ hung in the air, there and unwanted. Lup leaned against the door frame, just looking at him for a long moment.

“It used to be so easy, Bear. What happened?”

He gave her a shaky smile.

“We were going in circles. We can’t do that anymore, I guess. I guess we uh... we gotta go forward now.”

She looked down for a second and then met his eyes again, smiling just slightly. He closed the distance between them, ignoring the upturned chair as he took her in his arms. It felt so right, even now. It felt like coming home. She was his home.

“How can I help, Lup? What can I do?”

Her arms went around his waist and she rested her head against his shoulder.

“This, Bear. Talking. Listening. And... Shit, Barry, I should’ve seen how not okay you are too. We got too used to everything being broken and forgot to sit down and see what we could fix.”

He laughed a little.

“We’ll figure it out. We’ve got all the time in the world.”

She sighed a little, nuzzling against him, and spoke with all the love in the world.

“You’re such a fucking sap, babe.”


End file.
